Anti-Israel 'Mickey Mouse' row escalates

Mickey Mouse-style character Farfour calls on children to violently resist Israel to help Muslims

By Tim Butcher
in Jerusalem

12:01AM BST 11 May 2007

A Mickey Mouse-like character who urges Palestinian children to support armed resistance was at the centre of a snowballing row yesterday involving accusations of anti-Israel propaganda and incitement.

Israel complained bitterly when reports emerged of the character called Farfour on a Palestinian television programme discussing more than just traditional children’s matters.

In one of Farfour’s squeaky outbursts he says “Bush, we shall win! Condoleezza, we shall win! Sharon, we shall win!”

And later Farfour takes part in a song that used the lines “we will destroy the throne of the tyrants, we will pour the fire of death on them.”

The Israeli foreign ministry denounced the programme and issued a lengthy statement accusing the programme-makers of using seeking to “indoctrinate Palestinian children to violence, hatred and murder”.

At first, their complaint appeared to hit home with Mustafa Barghouti, the information minister and independent member of the Palestinian unity government, announcing the broadcaster, Al-Aqsa TV, had agreed to pull the programme.

But a spokesman for the station, which is owned and run by Hamas, the largest party in the unity government, later announced the programme would continue and to remove it would be a political surrender to Israel.

“Al-Aqsa TV refuses this pressure and refuses to cull its programme or alter any of its content,” Fathi Hamad, chairman of the Al-Aqsa television board in Gaza City, said.

“This campaign of criticism is part of a plan orchestrated by the West and the occupying power to attack Islam on the one hand and the Palestinian cause on the other. We have our own ways to educate our children and any criticism of this approach is shocking interference in our internal affairs.”

The issue of what children are exposed to in Israel and the occupied territories is highly sensitive. History books in Israeli schools contain maps that do not mark the so-called “Green Line” surrounding Gaza and the West Bank and which, critics say, suggest Israeli children are being taught that the occupied territories are Israeli.

Earlier this year Israel’s education minister, Yuli Tamir, was fiercely criticised by Right-wing politicians for suggesting the Green Line be included in text books.